Figure 6. Changes in areal coverage for different rain rate thresholds. (a) Areal mean coverage along each event (small dots) for different rain intensity thresholds (different colors) in historic events (horizontal axis) and future (PGW) events (vertical axis). Values are normalized by the maximal value observed for each rain rate threshold. Average inter-event values are marked with large circles. Filled circles demonstrate statistically significant changes between future and historic values, and one hollow circle shows an insignificant difference. (b) Fraction of events with larger areal coverage in historic compared to future simulations for each of the inspected rain rate thresholds.
3.4 Changes in Extreme Rain Rates for Different Durations
The change in maximal rain rate for each pixel displays different behavior along the study area and between durations. The maps in Fig. 7 show the difference between the inter-event average of the maximum rain rate per event for each pixel, over durations of 10-min to 24-h. For short durations (10-60 min, Fig. 7a-b, Fig. S7), a north-south gradient in maximal rain rates is evident in maximal rain rates. Significant decreases are identified mainly over the southern and eastern desert areas and far into the sea. In contrast, a positive change sub-parallel to the coastline and over Lebanon is present. It is observed mainly a few kilometers offshore and over the mountains at the north of the study region. Over longer durations (a few hours to one day), a larger portion of the region exhibits a significant change in maximal rain intensities (Fig. 7c-d, Fig. S7). This change is almost exclusively negative, focusing over both the desert area and most of the northern land region (excluding the shoreline and the upslopes of the Lebanon Mountains). In relative terms, for the longer durations, almost 25% of the area exhibits a decrease of more than 40% compared with areal-average maximal rain rate in historic events (Fig. S7). It must be noted, however, that the spatial perspective presented in Fig. 7 involves both the increase in rain rates, and the decrease in wet-frequency caused by smaller areal coverage of these intensities and shorter event durations, resulting in a mixture of increased and decreased maximal rain rates.